Presently in our 16th year, the Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival is presented in partnership with Old School Square in the heart of Delray Beach, Florida. Our audiences experience America’s best poets up-close … powerful, moving voices … at the festival in January, and throughout the year in our Community Outreach Program.

The 16th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival will kick off January 20-25, 2020. Applications for 2020 are now open. Workshop Faculty for 2020 includes: Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Nickole Brown, Reginald Gibbons, Jessica Jacobs, Major Jackson, Ilya Kaminsky, Dana Levin, Adrian Matejka, and Maggie Smith. Hopefully, the number of applicants will require adding an additional workshop. Our Special Guest Poet will be Joy Harjo who just became a Chancellor of the Academy. Patricia Smith will be the festival Poet-at-Large.

This year’s Special Guest is Joy Harjo, recently named Poet Laureate of the United States, the first Native American poet to hold this post. Programs off site throughout the week will include the High School Poetry Program in which award-winning poet Patricia Smith, Poet-At-Large, who will visit schools in Palm Beach County and give a reading on the festival stage on Friday evening. Individual Conference Faculty includes Lorna Knowles Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, and Angela Narciso-Torres.

The festival week includes six days of workshops, readings, craft talks, conferences, panel discussion, social events and so much more. Plan to apply to attend a workshop today and to focus on your work with an extraordinary faculty workshop leader.

The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is presented in partnership with Old School Square and is generously sponsored by Art Works of the National Endowment for the Arts, Morgan Stanley, The Legacy Group of Atlanta, GA, ... Read more >

Every year we work to bring poetry, in its every aspect, to our audiences, and fill a whole week with poetry events that feature America’s most extraordinary poets–at the festival. As we celebrate 16 years ... Read more >

The Festival congratulates Joy Harjo, our Special Guest Poet at the 16th annual festival, for her being named the 23rd United States Poet Laureate. We announced earlier that Harjo would be Special Guest Poet at ... Read more >

Participants will learn the basics of the Japanese literary form of senryu, the lighthearted cousin of haiku. Consisting of three lines of approximately 17 syllables, the senryu focuses on humans and human emotions, the good ... Read more >

The festival, through its program of Community Outreach, offers special events and 1-day workshops throughout the year. We welcome the community to join us for informal round-robin readings at Green Cay Nature Center; readings with the ... Read more >

Deadline to Submit is February 28, 2020. Winners will be announced in April. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival invites you to submit an original poem inspired by the Art Couture Exhibition at the Cornell Art ... Read more >

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